


red run cold

by arcadianwriter (noxstories)



Category: Rust (Video Game), SBI Rust - Fandom, Sleepy Boys Incorporate Rust
Genre: Character Study, RPF, SBI Rust Server, dynamic study, i rlly enjoyed writing this :), radiation poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28944192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxstories/pseuds/arcadianwriter
Summary: “Wilbur,” Tommy says earnestly one night, “play me a song. You haven’t in ages.”Wilbur thinks of his guitar, collecting dust under an old blanket, and of his hands, which shake too much to ever play it again. He doesn’t mention this to Tommy. Instead, he smiles.“Let me teach you a song,” he says instead, and watches Tommy’s face light up.[Or, Wilbur is dying. He is determined to give Tommy something to live for after he’s gone.][Or, an exploration of Wilbur and Tommy’s characters in their new Rust server.]
Relationships: (THEY ARE BROTHERS. HENCE THE &.), Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 31
Kudos: 263





	red run cold

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a little different from my usual mcyt fics, but i had fun anyway!! i am ready to start getting invested in the rust server and rlly have enjoyed it so far — this is just a rough little character/dynamic study of tommy and (mostly) wilbur’s characters!! 
> 
> i hope you enjoy!!

Wilbur is a time bomb of a man, all sharp edges and broken shards and with only so much time left to live. 

He hadn’t always been this way, but the past, where he’d cried into his pillow when the radiation descended and when he’d been a frightened, timid boy of eight in charge of a one year old, is far behind him now, and is of no concern to him anymore.

Wilbur only has so much time left. Tommy doesn’t.

Tommy is just as sharp-edged as Wilbur, but instead of bloody-nosed, he is grazed knees and the scent of summer and the sound of laughter before the radiation. He doesn’t remember a time Before, but he reminds Wilbur of that time, and for that, he’s grateful.

Wilbur is a time bomb, and he knows it. Tommy has his whole life ahead of him.

He’s been coming to terms with his imminent death as of late. Maybe that makes him cynical or pessimistic, but Wilbur’s always preferred to think of himself as a realist. He’s going to die, and he knows it, and it had used to terrify him. Now, he’s become more accustomed to imagining the world without him in it; of imagining life without him living it. It’s still scary, of _course_ it is, but he’s getting there. Slowly.

And it is imminent. He’s been exposed to far too much radiation, is far too sick from the gases in the air, can feel himself dying, day by day. He doesn’t have much time left, no matter what he tells his kid brother. But Tommy? Tommy, who Wilbur ensures has the best protective gear, who Wilbur ensures has the best weapons, who Wilbur ensures stays positive and happy and as much of a sixteen-year-old as he can manage? He’s got years and years left. Wilbur knows this, and is glad.

Wilbur doesn’t have years and years. Wilbur has months, if he’s lucky. 

He decides to make the most of his time by doing the one thing he cares about anymore.

He decides to help Tommy.   
  


Tommy is a time bomb in a different way, Wilbur comes to realise over the course of the weeks. He’s not dying from radiation, which is a relief, but he is going to end up dying to someone else, if he’s not incredibly careful. Wilbur can only teach him so much - sociability is not one of those things, and he can only watch in muted dismay as Tommy kills Ranboo as soon as they meet him, cackling while he does so. Wilbur knows Tommy isn’t a saint - knows he sees _this_ kind of death as fun and silly, knows he doesn’t even _think_ about death as anything other than temporary - but he’s frightened that the other members of their world won’t appreciate dying over and over and will end up killing his brother for good.

He doesn’t want to see his brother die. So he lays down some ground rules. 

No killing people outside of monuments, no stealing from people unless he tells Wilbur. Tommy grumbles and groans and complains as usual, but he must see the solemn look in his older brother’s eyes, because he agrees with less reluctance than usual. Wilbur ruffles his hair just to annoy him and Tommy shoves him just because he can, and things are back to normal. 

And he’s still around to keep an eye out for Tommy, for now. Maybe not for much longer, and maybe he’s not the best influence — he _does_ help Tommy kill someone in the lighthouse before they head off, he’s not sure that’s peak responsibility levels — but Wilbur keeps Tommy as safe as he can, within reason. He doesn’t push, though, because Tommy is a time bomb in a different way, and if he’s coddled too much, he’s likely to explode. He’s never liked being coddled. He’s never known it, not really. 

Wilbur finds ways to spoil him without Tommy really understanding what’s happening, though. When he gives his brother a rifle out of the blue as a present. When he lets Tommy direct them about on where to head, when he lets Tommy steer them towards the dome. When Tommy begs him to play guitar for him. They’re small things, that will mean nothing to Tommy right now, but Wilbur knows he’ll remember them. This is Tommy’s origin story into greatness, he’s certain of it: this is only his beginning. 

Because here’s the thing: Wilbur knows how his story ends. Ever since he woke up last year to find his hair beginning to whiten and fall out (a beanie is more useful than he’d ever imagined in hiding it), he’s known. But Tommy’s story, inevitable as it is to end at some point, is an unwritten book. There’s no ending planned for him. He has so many choices still left to make.

“I know how _my_ story ends,” Tommy brags when Wilbur mentions it idly to him, excluding the part about his own story, “it’s with the bullet of a gun or the edge of a fuckin’ knife. That’s the only way.”

His voice is full of youth; arrogant, optimistic youth that Wilbur misses hearing in his own voice. It’s almost unsettling to hear his sixteen year old brother speak of his impending doom at the hands of others, but strangely comforting too, because at least he knows Tommy doesn’t consider radiation a cause of death.

Bullet of a gun, edge of a knife. Neither are as painful or as torturously slow as radiation poisoning. 

_(Believe him. He knows.)_

At one selfish point in his life, when he passes out for the first time and awakens on the ground with a nosebleed, Wilbur considers asking Tommy to kill him. It would be much quicker, much less awful - but Tommy, underneath his wildness and chaos, is soft, soft for Wilbur, soft for his family. And he remembers the look in his brother’s eyes when Wilbur had instructed him on pulling a bullet from his leg, remembers how Tommy had flinched away from Wilbur’s pain, how desperate he’d been to reassure him. It’s in that moment he knows that he would die for Tommy, and dying quietly and in a corner without letting anyone know is the best thing he can do for his baby brother.

“You’re not going to tell him,” Ranboo notes one day when he finds Wilbur sitting at the side of the road, breathing shallowly and as slowly as possible to avoid fainting, “I feel like you probably should.”

Wilbur looks up, barely aware of his surroundings in the haze of sickness he’s in, only to force recognition into his gaze when he realises who’s speaking to him. “Tell him I’m dying?” He asks, sarcasm slipping into his words and making them more acerbic than they’re supposed to be. For a moment, he feels bad - as much as Tommy hates Ranboo, Wilbur doesn’t hold a grudge against him, and Ranboo is definitely one of the nicer people around. He doesn’t mean to snap, but he’s tired, he’s so sick and so tired. “I don’t think so, no. Don’t be an idiot. How do you think he’d take finding _that_ out?”

“It might be better than him just finding your dead body one day.” Ranboo doesn’t seem offended by his bitter tone, and Wilbur lets his head rest against the tree behind him, sighing quietly. The air is thick and choking; he’s used to it by now. It doesn’t make it any easier to suck oxygen into his lungs. “Don’t you think that might work better than pretending everything’s fine?”

He doesn’t answer Ranboo, staring ahead resolutely and knowing the other is right.

“Tommy’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t exactly one of them,” Ranboo continues quietly, “he’s probably already realised something isn’t right. It’s only a matter of time before you can’t hide it anymore.”

But that’s where Ranboo is wrong. Wilbur knows Tommy like the back of his hand, and knows that if Tommy suspected he was sick or dying, there would be a lot more action and fussing. Tommy would insist on giving him the better gear, would mother-hen him, making sure he did nothing strenuous - and in the end, it would all be for nothing, because Wilbur is dying no matter what Tommy does, and he knows this. Tommy wouldn’t ever accept it. He’d go to the ends of the earth for Wilbur - Wilbur knows this because he’d do the same for Tommy.

So no. Tommy doesn’t know, and if Wilbur has his way, he won’t know until the very end.

“When I die, and if you’re nearby, I want you to put a bullet through my head and make it look like murder,” he tells Ranboo casually, watching the kid’s eyes widen behind his goggles and mask, “if you’d be kind enough to honour a dying man’s last words, that is.”

“Of course,” Ranboo says after a pause, and now this is where Wilbur begins to feel guilty, because Ranboo had been right before - Tommy _is_ a smart kid, and if he remembers all Wilbur’s taught him over the years, then he’ll be able to track his footsteps and will assume Ranboo had been the one to kill him. As soon as Wilbur dies, Ranboo is a dead man walking - he’s just too nice to work that part out yet. “I will, if it’s what you want.”

Instead of warning him, Wilbur shoots a light smile at Ranboo. “You’re not so bad,” he says offhandedly, and Ranboo’s face softens in understanding.

In another life, maybe they would have been friends.

“You’re a brave man, Wilbur,” Ranboo tells him, and Wilbur swallows down his retorts that say otherwise. 

Wilbur Soot is not brave. He is scared, he is selfish, he is shitty. 

But as long as Tommy thinks otherwise, then Wilbur doesn’t give a damn.   
  


“Why don’t you ever wear a mask anymore, Wil?” Tommy quizzes him at the top of the dome one night, as they overlook the forests and lands around them. “Aren’t you scared of radiation drifting this way?”

Wilbur doesn’t have the heart to tell Tommy that radiation has already done its damage inside of him. Instead, he laughs good-naturedly. “Radiation only affects teenagers, child,” he tells him, watching Tommy’s eyes narrow in mock-annoyance and his face begin to turn red in outrage, “I’m old enough to be safe.”

It’s peaceful up here, just him and Tommy and the silence from the rest of the world. He even feels safe up here; maybe this is a good place to die, he thinks offhandedly, up on top of the dome, where he’ll slip off and his body will look like he’d fallen accidentally. Wilbur lets his eyes shut, lets himself take a moment to breathe in the old air and the cold breeze. Coming here had been a good idea: Tommy will have something to build upon and keep himself busy with after Wilbur’s death. It offers him some relief. Tommy had always been a nightmare when he had nothing to preoccupy him.

“That’s not fucking true,” Tommy whines, “I’m not even a child anymore. I’m sixteen.”

“That’s still child age,” Wilbur grins, “you’ll be a man one day, Toms, don’t worry.”

He tries to picture his brother growing old, finds it hard. Tommy has always seemed like Peter Pan; the boy who never grows old, the boy destined to be young forever. Tommy with a wife, Tommy with kids, Tommy finding safety from the radiation and hell of the world - every image seems so improbable in his mind. But Tommy’s future is still bright; as long as he keeps the optimism and drive that’s kept him alive this long, he’ll survive just fine. Wilbur’s spent the last few years making sure of it.

“You’re a prick,” Tommy says, but there’s fierce fondness in his words that makes Wilbur’s heart warm. He tips his head back to the sky and tries to find the stars, chest alight with affection and happiness and content. “You know that?”

He’d like to join the stars after he died. 

Wilbur brings himself back to Earth, back to the dome, with an effort, back to Tommy.

“Yeah,” he laughs, reaching for a cigarette, “I know.”

  
“Do you ever wonder,” Wilbur remembers asking his mother as a child, “what stars are made from?”

His mother laughs in his memory, soft and smoky and hazy around the edges with a glow. “They’re made from lost souls, baby,” she tells him, “God’s forgotten children, so nobody ever forgets them again.”

He remembers frowning at this answer, unsatisfied in the way only an eight year old could be. “How can God forget so many children?” He quizzes, folding his arms. 

Wilbur’s mother had died in the initial radiation scares, way back when all this - whatever this is - had started. He remembers her dying in front of him. She dies in front of him almost every night in his dreams. 

“God is kind, Wil,” she says to him the night before the explosion, smoothing his hair back from his face, “but God is so busy. Sometimes He can’t look after everyone at once, so when they die, He turns them into stars, so that people like you and I can look up to them every night and see how beautiful they are.”

“I want to be a star one day,” Wilbur tells her, and she laughs, pressing a kiss to his forehead and turning his light off, “in the future, with Tommy.”

“Not with me and Daddy?” She teases, eyes sparkling with fondness. “Just you and Tommy?”

“You two too. But-” And Wilbur scrunches his nose up, hearing his little brother beginning to cry next door. “But Tommy is only a baby. I need to look after him when we’re in the stars.”

His mother softens, looking at him with fondness that’s impossible to replicate in a dream. “You’re a good big brother, Wil,” she whispers, “sleep tight. I love you, my star.”

Wilbur thinks now that his mother had been wrong to say stars were the lost children. He thinks people in the stars got lucky not to be here anymore. He thinks that God has forgotten His children on Earth, all of them.

He thinks a lot of things, but says nothing. Instead, he lights another cigarette, and watches over Tommy as he sleeps.

Maybe he’ll ask God all his questions when he goes.

  
“Wilbur,” Tommy says earnestly one night, “play me a song. You haven’t in ages.”

Wilbur thinks of his guitar, collecting dust under an old blanket, and of his hands, which shake too much to ever play it again. He doesn’t mention this to Tommy. Instead, he smiles.

“Let me teach you a song,” he says instead, and watches Tommy’s face light up. “Can you get me my guitar?”

Tommy leaps eagerly to this request, running upstairs to the new second floor of their house — Wilbur’s not an architect, but he’s pretty pleased with how well the house is designed — and rushing back down just as quickly clutching an old, battered black guitar. Seeing it, he can’t help but smile. Tommy had been taking guitar lessons a year or so ago, he knows the chords; whether or not he remembers how to play is the question, but Wilbur’s confident he does. 

Tommy loops the strap around his body with inexperienced nerves, wiping his grimy hands on his jeans before looking at Wilbur expectantly for the song. 

He knows exactly what song he’s going to teach Tommy. It’s from his scattered sheet music he’s been working on, his favourite song, the one he’s been working on since he’d found out he’d been dying. The chords are easy enough, and it’s only a short song — unfinished, a verse and a chorus. Wilbur hasn’t had the energy to write more. It’s a symbol, he thinks sardonically that night, of his own life: a verse and a chorus, nothing more, the ending tragic and cut short. Within an hour or two, Tommy begins to pick it up, playing the opening with soft, careful strums. Wilbur shuffles closer to the fire, studying his little brother’s face intently as Tommy focuses on learning the strumming pattern. He never wants to forget this moment. He hopes Tommy never does, either. 

“Ready?” Wilbur asks Tommy after a while, and Tommy nods, before hesitating. 

“Can you sing along, Wil?” He asks, some hidden depth in his voice. 

Wilbur stares at him, and, for a moment, thinks Tommy knows his secret. There’s unusual expression on his brother’s face, unusual solemnity that he almost doesn’t recognise — Tommy looks so sad and so old that it gives Wilbur whiplash. 

But then Tommy keeps looking at him, expectantly, and, rather than pushing, Wilbur clears his throat. 

“Don’t you dare make fun of me if I sound rusty.”

Tommy cracks a smirk. “Getting old?”

 _I wish,_ Wilbur thinks, but only laughs, rubbing his throat and sitting up straighter. 

“Start playing,” he tells Tommy with an eye roll, and within seconds, Tommy does. 

The music sounds a lot softer coming from him, which would be a surprise to people who only know the outward persona Tommy puts on. To Wilbur, who knows him better than he knows himself, it’s not a surprise at all. His brother is so much more than people think he is. _Jubilee Line_ doesn’t make much sense to Tommy, he knows: he’s too young to remember London or trains, but it doesn’t seem to matter: there’s a faint smile on Tommy’s face and the tension is absent from his shoulders, and if Wilbur squints, Tommy is the same child he’s always been, cheerful and bright and the best kid he’s ever known. 

It’s then that Wilbur makes another decision, to hang on as long as possible for Tommy. Because he can delay the end of his story, if only he tries. Because he isn’t ready for this to be one of their last songs, he isn’t ready to have his book finish while Tommy’s is just beginning. 

He’s going to be there when Tommy shows the whole world just how incredible he is, and he’s going to be there to tell Tommy to his face how fucking proud he is of him. 

“Is that the end of the song?” Tommy asks curiously, after they’ve finished, and Wilbur smiles genuinely. 

“No,” he says, “I think I’m going to write another verse for you.”

Tommy whoops, and Wilbur leans back in his chair as the stars shine bright above them. 

Maybe he’ll even give his song a happier ending.


End file.
